The Last 150 Days? Why Obama's Path Must Be a Track

It is not much of a landmark, but, in 150 days, we're going to be electing ourselves a president again. We will do so in a political world made wholly different by the power of anonymous corporate money and by the ongoing descent of the Republican party into the kind of madness from which there seems to be no real escape. The airwaves are going to be full of slander and calumny. Imaginary, but profitable, hobgoblins will stalk the land, howling through 10,000 thirty-second spots. The whole event will take place within the sprawling corporate Id of the country. In 150 days, we'll be electing ourselves a president again, and the story this year is the money, and the money is the only story, and everything else is a puppet show.

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

The president has a clear path to re-election, but also a damned narrow one. Already this year, he has seen his record and performance in office the subject of truthless attacks on the one hand from Willard Romney, who really is just the most remarkable liar, and on the other hand by a strange mixture of less-than-gruntled Democrats. Understandably dismayed by the administration's admittedly dismal record on civil liberties, and increasingly uneasy with the president's apparent comfort in the role of Jove, hurling high-tech thunderbolts down on wedding parties half-a-world away, the liberal base has been uneasy for going on three years now, so much so that the administration likely takes that now as rather the normal course of things. What has blind-sided them a bit in the past few weeks, I'm thinking, is the sudden re-emergence of polite, but pointed, PUMA-ism.

All of a sudden, Bill Clinton's off the reservation. All of a sudden, Mark (Plague Ship) Penn is back on cable television, sniping from the cheap seats. Here's former Governor Ed Rendell, yapping about how we're all pussies who wouldn't last 10 seconds in the stands at an Eagles game in December. (This is not even to mention the apparently deathless interest being stirred up on behalf of Hillary '16, Hillary '20, or Hillary 2525.) While they've grown accustomed to ignoring the concerns of their supporters on the left, I don't think the Obama campaign was prepared for the specter of having to relitigate portions of the 2008 campaign again this time around.

If it weren't for the concerted effort by people to roll back the stone from the tomb, the president wouldn't have had to abandon his completely legitimate campaign criticism of Romney's time at Bain Capital. My lord, four years after the financial-services sector nearly ate the world, and in the middle of the first serious discussion of class in our politics in nearly 60 years, and the president can't point out that his opponent in the upcoming election is on the wrong side of both those issues? In part, of course, this is the money; he's got to raise at least some of it from the same sewer into which the Republicans dip their bucket. But the other part of it was the criticism that came from the elite media, provoked by the Clinton wing of the party, which is neither left not right, but which insists on flying the plane anyway.

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

And, in case he's missed it, the courtier press is beginning to powder up its wigs and is out buying new bodkins in preparation for the arrival of the Romney administration. The Politico is beyond hope already, and Maureen Dowd has decided that he's not manly enough anymore. The beat-sweetening suck-up-a-thon is at a remarkable point. Drudge is pimping the latest unmitigated offal from that charlatan, Ed Klein, and Mark Halperin, who would sell his white-haired granny to the Somali pirates to have Drudge wink his way, has decided that Klein's long career as a transparent bullshit artist makes him now worth listening to because the president seems to be struggling. And, most spectacularly, having abandoned shame at about the same time she was graduating from Mary, Queen Of Happy Hour grammar school, the Crazy Dolphin Lady has decided that her heart really belongs to... wait for it... Bill Clinton. Some day, I have got to find out where that woman buys her mushrooms.

I do not envy him trying to walk this narrow path. In many ways, this president reminds me of the truck drivers in The Wages of Fear, trying to get the nitroglycerine over the mountains with blowing themselves all to hell and gone. In so many ways, he is still outside of things. In so many ways, he is still the flyer the Democratic party took in 2008. In so many ways, the path he has to walk to re-election is similar to the path he has had to walk through his life. It was hard not to notice the subtext present in all those earnest warnings about hurting the fee-fees of our financial titans. The president was stepping out of his place. The president was being uppity again.

This is also the case with what is perhaps the most noxious idea out there: that Barack Obama "failed" in his promise to "bring the country together," and that he is now — Glorioski! — campaigning like he wants to be president all over again. He is engaging in politics. Mother of mercy, I swear David Brooks is just going to break down and go all to pieces on PBS some evening over the president's betrayal of his role as the country's anodyne black man and, of course, his upcoming role as black martyr to incivility and discord. It is his duty, dammit, to be all the things that people like Brooks wanted him to be so that he could lose, nobly, and then the country could go back to its rightful owners.

The event of him is still remarkable. The idea that Americans elected a black man to be its president 40 years after it declined to allow Martin Luther King, Jr. to stand on a balcony without getting shot still maintains its power to awe and inspire. Of course, he can't make full use of that, either, because, as we know, by virtue of his very election, race is no longer an issue in this country. But the rest of us can make of it what we will. There was in his cautious, no-drama campaign a sense that you could get in on the making of history again. It's time for Barack Obama to be as bold as he wants the rest of the country to be. If the path is narrow, you might as well run as walk.

A Part of Hearst Digital Media
Esquire participates in various affiliate marketing programs, which means we may get paid commissions on editorially chosen products purchased through our links to retailer sites.